How to Stop Biting Your Nails (and Other Nervous Habits)
Hair pulling, skin picking, and knuckle cracking are just a few examples of pesky habits many of us just can’t resist. Here are 10 tips to stop the snap, crackle, and pop of your body-focused nervous habits.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How to Stop Biting Your Nails (and Other Nervous Habits)
Nail biting—as well as its close cousins hair pulling, skin picking, knuckle cracking, lip chewing, cheek biting, and other body-focused repetitive habits—usually happens without a conscious decision; instead, we discover ourselves with the aftermath—nubby nails, a lip callus, or an accumulation of inadvertently pulled-out hair.
See also: How to Make or Break a Habit.
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Body-focused habits can begin at any age, but they usually begin in childhood and peak in the pre-teen years—around ages 11 to 13. But whether you’re young or young at heart, if your nervous habits are bothering you, check out these 10 tips to stop body-focused behaviors like going dental on your digits.
Thanks to listener Sylvie Daley of Marshfield, Vermont for asking how to stop nail-biting, which inspired this week’s topic.
Tip #1: Don’t worry—it’s not an indication of some deep, dark, unresolved issue. Instead, there’s evidence that hair pulling, nail biting, and other body-focused behaviors have a neurological origin and are genetically based. Hair pulling, for instance, seems to run in families. It even goes beyond our species; animals like monkeys, cats, dogs, and mice sometimes overgroom.
And despite popular belief, “nervous habits” may be a misnomer. It’s questionable if the habits are even related to anxiety. Indeed, a 2013 study found that anxiety disorders, including OCD, were more common in non-nail biters than in nail biters. Regardless of the origins, some mindful attention and compassionate practice can help stop your habit.
Tip #2: Habit change starts with noticing the habit. Habits are automatic. We don’t think about them. For example, you probably automatically cough into your arm (at least I hope you do) or cover your mouth when you yawn. If you wanted to change one of these automatic habits, your first step would simply be to start noticing them. Same goes for nail biting, hair pulling, etc. How to do this? Listen on…
Tip #3: Change your mindset from “I will stop now,“ to “I will start practicing now.” If, each time you catch yourself with your thumbnail between your incisors, you berate yourself with “There I go again,” or “I’m so stupid,” you’ll feel frustrated and probably give up. But, if you acknowledge that you’re changing a habit—something really hard to do—you’ll breathe a little easier.
Frame it as practice. For instance, tell yourself you must catch yourself 100 times before your habit starts to change. That way, each time you find yourself with a strand of hair in hand, rather than chastising yourself, you’ll simply say, “OK, that was number 41—one closer to my goal of catching myself 100 times.” Counting up those catches will feel like honing a mindful skill rather than tallying your failures.
Tip #4: Be particularly aware of sedentary, unfocused times. Watching TV, lying in bed, sitting in class, waiting at a stoplight, zoning out for a few moments at your desk at work: these are perilous times for your pinkies. Likewise for high-danger moods like boredom or anxiety. Work on noticing your personal danger times.
Tip #5: Involve a compassionate spotter. If you live with someone, you may wish to enlist him or her as an extra layer of observation. But they don’t need to nag or chastise. A neutral reminder of “nails, sweetie” or “hair pulling, honey” is sufficient.
Tip #6: Catch yourself searching. Sometimes body-focused habits get triggered by a sensation or another stimulus—you may, without thinking, run your hand through your hair, looking for one that’s different, or you may unconsciously run your fingertips over your nails, feeling for unevenness. If searching is part of your process, aim to notice when the searching begins and redirect your actions from there.
Tip #7: You don’t have to scratch that itch. You may get the urge to bite, pick, or pull, but knowing you don’t have to do it can be freeing. Rather than thinking “I have to pull out this hair” you can put some distance between you and the urge by saying “I’m having the urge to pull out this hair,” or “I’m having a thought that I should pick at this imperfection in my skin.” Just because a thought occurs to you, doesn’t mean you have to listen to it.
Tip #8: When you catch yourself, have an alternative action ready. This is the big one. Once you’ve figured out your high-likelihood times, places, or moods, keep an alternative diversion handy. This is what psychologists call a competing behavior. You can keep a small, smooth stone on your desk to handle during those idle times, carry an emery board and file your nails instead of biting them, keep a stress ball in your car for those stoplights, or, like an acquaintance of mine did, start wearing lots of cool silver rings to fiddle with instead of picking her skin while in class.
Tip #9: Substitute a less costly body behavior. Behavior exists because it’s reinforced—people get something out of it. Many folks get some variant of pleasure—satisfaction, relief, accomplishment, or release—with the sensation of crunching a fingernail, pulling out an eyelash, picking at a skin imperfection, or cracking a knuckle.
So experiment with substituting a similarly satisfying body sensation that doesn’t cost so much—gently comb your scalp with a wide-toothed comb when you get the urge to search and pull your hair, chew gum or fiddle with a toothpick or flosser instead of biting your nails, or make fists and do a full-body stretch instead of picking to get that sense of physical release and relief.
Tip #10: If it gets in the way of life, you’re not alone. Something I talk about a lot on the Savvy Psychologist podcast is that most behaviors exist on a spectrum; body-focused habits are no exception. Everyone bites, pulls, or picks occasionally. But hair pulling, when it takes up a lot of time and causes noticeable, embarrassing hair loss, has a name: it’s called trichotillomania and affects 2-4% of people. Skin picking that takes a lot of time and causes injury is called excoriation disorder and affects 5% of people—a full 1 in 20.
Bottom line: You’re not alone.
The good news is there are some great resources out there. For trichotillomania, an excellent, insightful book is Help for Hair Pullers by Dr. Nancy Keuthen, one of the world’s experts on the topic. In addition, two scientifically-based online treatment sites are stoppulling.com and stoppicking.com. They aren’t free, but the cost is way less than seeing an in-person therapist. And an information-packed, supportive website for adults and kids alike is trich.org.
To sum up, start trying to catch yourself, figure out your high hazard times, substitute a competing behavior, and get help if it’s getting in the way of your life. And if all else fails for nail biting, wait a few decades, and then. . . just take out your dentures.
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References
Feusner, J.D., Hembacher, E., Phillips, K.A. (2009). The mouse who couldn’t stop washing: Pathologic grooming in animals and humans. CNS Spectrums, 14, 503-513.
Pacan, P., Grzesiak, M. Reich, A., Kantorska-Janiec, M., Szepietowski, J. (2013). Onychophagia and Onychotillomania: Prevalence, Clinical Picture and Comorbidities. Acta Dermato-Venereologica, 94, 67-71.
Novak CE, Keuthen NJ, Stewart SE, Pauls DL. (2009). A twin concordance study of trichotillomania. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B 150B:944–949.;
Nail biting and hair pulling images courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.